'But . . . well, how many
'Ah, you see, that's the hard part. Maybe two, maybe a hundred, depending on whether you're thinking of Inuit or Yupak, or whether you're counting lexemes, or morphemes, or derived—'
'Careful, you're losing me. To say nothing of the waiting masses.'
'Look, the important thing is, it doesn't matter, it doesn't prove anything. However many they have, it's no big deal. Look at it this way: How many words do we have for water?'
'Well, I was going to say one, but now I think I'd better wait and see.'
'Good move. What about ‘ice?’ ‘Fog?’ ‘Mist?’ ‘Snow,’ for that matter?'
'Yes, I guess if you want to stretch a point—'
'But it's not stretching a point. They all stand for water in different forms. And what about ‘river,’ ‘stream,’ ‘brook,’ ‘creek,’ ‘eddy'? They all mean water—water moving at different rates in different conditions.'
'And you're saying that's the kind of thing the Eskimos do for snow?'
'Sure. And if some Eskimo linguist studied us, he'd probably say English is amazing: separate, completely independent words for standing-water-in-large quantities, standing-water-in-medium-sized-quantities, standing- water-in-small—quantities—'
She wrinkled her nose. “Hold on now. . . .'
''Ocean,’ ‘lake,’ and ‘pond,'” he said. “We even have one for standing-water-in-teeny-weeny-quantities.'
'Mmm . . .” Thinking, she stared out the window. “Puddle?'
'Now you're catching on, see?'
'Yes, I'm starting to. It's interesting. Now, what's your problem, exactly?'
'I can't seem to come up with a simple way of starting.'
'Why don't you write what you just said? The whole bit, from the beginning?'
He looked at her. “That's a good idea, I will.” But his face, which had momentarily cleared, fell. “What did I say?'
'Sorry,” she said, “if I'd realized you weren't paying attention I'd have taken notes.'
'God help me,” he wailed, but he was laughing.
He was laughing more these days, she noted with pleasure. Not that he'd ever been ill-humored; far from it. But over the last year or so she'd begun to sense a lessening of verve, of the essential liveliness and interest in everything that had always been such a big part of him. She'd pondered on the possibilities of midlife crisis (he was 44), of career dissatisfaction (he was a full professor at the University of Washington's Port Angeles campus; where did he go from there?), and even—but only briefly and when she was in one of her own rare periods of insecurity—of boredom with their marriage.
It had taken her a while, but in the end she'd put her finger on it: it was Port Angeles itself, the remote, one- time lumbering town on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula, where the university, in an effort to be ready for the sure-to-come population expansion from Seattle, had built a well-endowed, full-scale campus. The problem was that they had gotten there a bit too early. Port Angeles was a lively, attractive town in a glorious location, but a cultural center—a city—it wasn't; not yet. And Gideon, she had belatedly realized after five years of marriage, was a city person through and through, born and bred in Los Angeles. He had taken the Port Angeles position, an associate professorship at the time, largely for her sake, so that she could continue working with ease at Olympic National Park.
He'd never once complained; indeed, in many ways it was obvious that he loved the place—the clean air, the nearby Olympic Mountains, the startlingly beautiful Alpine lakes tucked into pristine green valleys, the laid-back atmosphere of the university campus. But no opera, no real theater or museums, no fine restaurants, no Mariner games. To get to any of those meant a four-hour round trip by highway, bridge, and ferry boat, and when the weather was bad, a pretty common occurrence in these parts, it meant a night spent in a Seattle hotel and a pre- dawn start home the next day if it happened to be a workday. And so, little by little, they'd pretty much stopped going, except for the occasional university event at the main campus. That had suited her fine; she was a country girl at heart, never at her best in cities. But, she had only recently come to realize, it hadn't suited him.
And so when the opportunity had been offered him to join the faculty at the main campus in Seattle—he'd turned down a similar chance once before—she had encouraged him to accept, and this time he had, and they had moved to Bainbridge Island, still on the Olympic Peninsula side of the Sound but only six miles from downtown Seattle, a comfortable 35-minute ferry ride. She had pushed for the move in an open-hearted spirit of self-sacrifice —it would mean a ninety-minute drive to work for her each way instead of her former ten-minute walk, but she'd found that it was a good thing for her too. Her drive was beautiful and uncrowded, a relaxing, mind-clearing ramble over the Hood Canal bridge, through grand, fragrant forests of Douglas fir, and along the lush flanks of the Olympics all the way to Port Angeles. With a new flex-time arrangement, she went in only four days a week now. And she and Gideon were now getting into the city a couple of times a week for one thing or another—and, except for the one night the ferries had stopped running because of the high seas, they had been getting home the same night regardless of the weather.
Things were good. It had been a smart move.
'Going to have any more wine?” she asked, reaching for the bottle.
'I don't think so, thanks,” he said, smiling, just as the telephone in the kitchen rang. “Oh, jeez,” he said, “that has to be Lester. Would you mind taking it? Tell him I'm anywhere but here, and you don't know when I'll be back.'
'I'll do what I can,” she said, getting up, “but you know, you'll have to talk to him sometime.'
'Not if I can help it. Tell him I went out for a quart of milk last Monday,” he called after her, “and you haven't seen me since.'
For over a week his editor had been pestering him about the title page. Lester wanted the author listed as “Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective,” making use of the irksome nickname that had been applied to him years
